As much as I love this film, I have been dreading writing this review of it. I mean, where do you start? Alright let me give this a go. Christopher Nolan has done almost the impossible here. He has not only matched his previous film, the blockbuster “The Dark Knight”, he has bettered it. Seriously, could you imagine anyone trying to top “The Dark Knight”? Well, Nolan has done just that.
“Inception” is many things, an amazing film, a film about layers of the dream world, it is a reverse-heist film (they are planting something rather than stealing something), but most of all, it is a story of a man trying to get home. The plot of “Inception” is a complex one, but I’ll give it a shot.
After being wrongfully accused of his wife’s murder, Cobb has been on the run from the authorities, leaving his children in the care of their grandparents. Cobb is an expert in subconscious espionage and as such can back-door into someone’s dreams and steal valuable information from them that they would not ever give up while they were awake. However, when a Japanese business man named Saito offers Cobb a job, it is not to steal something from somebody, but the opposite, to plant an idea into his competitors head to break up his company after his father passes away. Planting an idea is a much harder task than stealing one, and it goes by the name of “Inception”. The reason that it is so difficult is because you have to go through a number of layers in the dream world, to make the dreamer truly believe that it is his or her idea, therefore you need to go into a dream within a dream within a dream. Cobb initially declines, due to the dangers involved, but when Saito mentions that he has the power to be able to let Cobb finally go home, Cobb has to agree (this could be his last chance to see his kids). From here Cobb assembles his team, and the team set off in trying to complete the difficult task.
That is the plot in a nutshell, and it is a damn exciting film, with the majority of the two and a half hour running time being devoted to the actual job of inception or the “heist”, if you will. However, what makes this film truly special is the end, or more specifically, the final shot. What Christopher Nolan has done here is ended the film so perfectly and ambiguously that it is forever being debated. Is it real or is it a dream? This debating that is continually going on, is keeping the film alive in our minds and we all want to go back and re-watch the film in the hope of finding some clues that will reveal the “truth”. At the end of the day, though, I am not sure that there is any “truth”, because there are different things or scenes that happen in this film that complement whatever side of the argument you are championing.
My personal belief is that the ending is reality and not a dream. This is for a number of reasons, the first being that to me that top does begin to topple, also Cobb’s children are slightly older than when he last saw or remembers them, and they are also dressed differently. The main reason though, has all to do with Cobb’s wedding ring (is this his true totem?). Throughout the film, any time Cobb is in the real world, he is seen NOT wearing his wedding ring, where as any time he is in the dream world, he is always wearing his wedding ring. To me this is an obvious directorial decision to differentiate between the real and dream worlds. When Cobb finally goes home and sees his children again, he is without wedding ring, proving my conclusion (and this is what I believe, I’m not saying that it is exclusively right) that the end is reality.
The thing about the totems always frustrates me though, because early in the film when he is explaining their purpose, he mentions that everyone must have their own totem and no-one else should be allowed to touch it, yet the totem that he carries around with him is not his (at least originally), it’s Mal’s, his deceased wife. Does that make Cobb’s totem unreliable? Anyway, what most people don’t realize when debating about whether the top falls at the end or not, is that it doesn’t matter. Cobb isn’t even looking at the top, his eyes are firmly on his children. So whether or not it is a dream is irrelevant, because Cobb doesn’t care anymore, he is back with his kids and that is all he cares about.
Ultimately the finale is one of emotion and not the is it / isn’t it scenario that everybody puts such importance on. Technically the film is amazing, with some great special effects, where surprisingly a lot more were done in-camera than you would think. The images in this film are astonishing, things I had never seen before, just amazing. The cast are all great (I’m turning into quite the Leo fan), but I must admit that I loved Tom Hardy’s light comedy relief as Eames. It’s always great to see Marion Cotillard on the big-screen, both my wife and I think she is luminous, she’s just gorgeous. It was also nice to see Nolan use, what appears to be, his favourite actors in Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine.
The main problem that I had with this film was that I had a lot of problems hearing Saito’s dialogue (Ken Watanabe’s accent is very thick), so much so that when we watched “Inception” on blu-ray, we had to turn the subtitles on. Other than that, this movie is stellar, a great film. The only problem now is how can Christopher Nolan top this?
Ranked 7 in Top 25 of 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment